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In the Apple TV+ drama series seriousnessAdam Scott stars as Mark, a mid-level employee at the mysterious Lumon Corporation who, along with his colleagues, has undergone a surgical procedure that separates their private and work personalities, leaving the “innies” — as they’re known on office – in the dark about who their “outies” are outside of work. Created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller, seriousness follows Mark and his co-workers as they slowly learn more about the company and try to align their innie and outie personas among the ever-watching powers that want to separate their employees forever.
Scott joined THR rewards editor Tyler Coates for a one-on-one conversation as part of THR‘Closer Look’ series. (Scott and his co-stars Britt Lower, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, Zach Cherry and Tramell Tillman previously joined Stiller, Erickson and cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné for a more in-depth conversation about the Apple TV+ thriller.)
While seriousness sees all of Lumon’s employees split into two personas, it’s Scott’s character Mark who sees the audience both inside and outside the confines of Lumon’s HQ. That presented an immediate challenge to Scott, essentially requiring him to play two separate characters in Severance’s ten episodes. †The first instinct for me, and for many actors I’d imagine, was to say, ‘Let’s have one of them have a beret and a limp — that could be a lot of fun,’ says Scott, pointing out that Stiller and Erickson settled on something less visually obvious. “It was very important to Dan, Ben and I that it felt like the same man. Since it’s the same person, we’re just seeing different parts of his life, almost different halves of the same person. It’s just that you have about forty odd years of life experience: sadness, happiness, and all the things that come with a full life. And the other is, by all accounts, about two and a half years old.”
One aspect of the show that helped Scott transition between characters was the Lumon elevator — that’s when Severance’s audience sees the outies transition into innies and vice versa. “YouIt really kind of ended the two characters for me,” Scott says of the elevator sequences. “Of course I would have to switch from one to the other very quickly. And it was more of an internal shift than anything. Ttrying to figure out how i could let it be like this without feeling like i had to do some major, physical morphing or transformation, really [distilled] it comes down to the internal differences between the two.”
As for Mark’s outie, who we are told went through the grueling procedure after his wife’s death as a supposedly easy way to get over his grief, the character’s motivations were easy to understand for Scott. †I went through a grieving process in my life,” Scott reveals. “My mother had passed away early in the pandemic and I had been home here with my wife and children, [which] a kind of cushioning of the blow. A few months later I was alone in New York [filming the show] and realized that I had a lot of grieving to do, but also a lot of processing work.”
for Scott, seriousness was more than a regular job. “The show was right in front of me,” he says. “I only processed and grieved on my own, but also processed and grieved through the show. I’m still so grateful it was there for me in a way, because I was sorting it out, both on screen and off, while we were shooting.”